My colleague John Coleman talks about the relationship between data, information and knowledge: How data is vital, but not so useful until it can be turned into information and then disseminated as knowledge. Our boss, the Secretary of Planning, Richard E. Hall, puts the process in more industrial terms: turning pig iron into steel into automobiles.

The point is: data is raw material. The public, government, business and other institutions receive enormous amounts of it every day. But the trick — in fact, often the line between success and failure — is the ability to make sense of it.